The kid watched expressionlessly.
Rasmussen said, “Now you try it.”
Rasmussen had intended for the kid to make a practice throw without a ball, but hadn’t realized the kid already had a ball in his hand. The kid turned and threw.
The clumsy throwing motion he’d had was gone. He moved exactly like Rasmussen had, right down to the lack of a full windup because Rasmussen’s shoulder was stiff. This ball also hit right in the center of the strike zone!
Rasmussen said, “Um, that was pretty damn good. When you wind up, cock your arm back further. You imitated me nicely, but I can’t cock all the way back because I’ve got a stiff shoulder.”
“Cock?” the kid said, looking like he was about to smirk about the innuendo inherent to the word.
Rasmussen managed not to roll his eyes. Instead, he stepped over, had the kid slowly go through the throwing motion, and when Buchry got to the cocked position Rasmussen moved his arm and hand back where they should be. “Okay, try it like that.
This time the throwing motion looked elegant. The ball hit right in the center of the strike zone again!
Rasmussen blinked, “Can you throw it harder?”
Buchry shrugged. He threw again and the ball hit with an authoritative snap. Exactly in the center of the strike zone!
Holy crap! Rasmussen thought. “Try throwing full on.”
“Full on?”
“As hard as you can.”
The kid shrugged again. When he threw, his mechanics looked gorgeous. The ball was hard to see. The “whap!” when it hit the center of the strike zone’s canvas flap drew the attention of all the kids in the gym.
Rasmussen turned to the other kids and called out, “Switch dribbling and shooting again.”
He heard one of them say, “Aw coach,” evidencing their boredom.
He called out, “I’ll be over in a minute and we’ll start some half-court games.” He turned to Buchry, “Can you hit the inside corner of that strike zone?”
The kid frowned, “Inside corner?”
Rasmussen studied the kid for a moment, thinking he had to be bullshitting. The kid obviously knew how to pitch. He’d just been pretending he’d never done it earlier. No one could pitch that well without endless hours of practice. Rasmussen wanted to bark at him, but he also wanted the kid to pitch for his baseball team. I’ll just go along with this crap, he thought, then explained where the inside corner would be if you were facing a right-handed batter.
“So, the inside corner is actually the inside edge?”
Rasmussen nodded.
“Should I throw it near the top or the bottom so it’d actually be at a corner?”
Rasmussen forbore explaining the three-dimensional shape of the strike zone and why the inside corner wasn’t really at the corner of the zone as you look at it from the front. Instead, he just said, “Sure, throw it near the bottom.”
Buchry turned and looked at the target, “Is it okay for it to touch the corner, or does it need to go through clean?”
Rasmussen snorted, “It’s okay for it to touch.”
The kid wound up and threw. The ball touched both the bottom and the side as it went through, right in the corner. Fast.
Oh my God! Rasmussen thought. Aloud, he said, “You’re pretty damned good, kid. You should go out for baseball.”
“I prefer martial arts,” the kid said. “Should I get the balls now?”
Stunned, Rasmussen said, “Sure, then go sub out…” Rasmussen looked at his clipboard, “Davidson on the basketball court.”
After that, Rasmussen had more enthusiasm for his pitching experiment, but the rest of the kids were just as awful as the ones in the morning.
He waited until the end of the class to talk to Buchry again, “I was completely serious back there. You really should go out for baseball. You could probably get a scholarship.” Then he thought to himself that the kid had to be playing league baseball and must already know he could get a scholarship.
Sure that the kid had been pulling his leg, he felt surprised when Buchry said “Really?” as if he couldn’t believe it.
“Yeah, I’ll send you the stuff.”
***
Hax was sitting at the corner of one of the tables in the lunchroom, eating what he’d brought from home. Hallie sat down at the neighboring corner of the next table. Without looking at him, she said quietly, “Hey, I hear you’re quite the pitcher.”
Hax resisted the impulse to turn and stare at her. “Where’d you hear that?”
“It’s all over school. Formerly clumsy kid is now an amazing athlete. Kicks ass in martial arts and is a pitching God.”
Hax snorted, “I only threw a few pitches in Coach Rasmussen’s pitching demo.”
“Rumors are, you’re blowing out the back of the pitching net and placing every pitch exactly where you want it. From what I hear, the major leagues are calling.”
Enormously proud to have Hallie talking him up, Hax nonetheless said in a disbelieving tone, “That’s ridiculous.”
“Well, I think it’s pretty cool,” Hallie said. Then she started getting up. In a flat and depressed tone, she said, “Here comes my boyfriend. I’d better go meet him like a good doggie.”
Hax looked at her as she walked away. She was practically skin and bones. Vito glared at Hax. Hax restrained himself from glaring back. As they walked away, Hax thought about the fact that Vito liked baseball and would be going out for the team. That alone was a good enough reason for Hax not to go out.
Then he pictured himself “accidentally” beaning Vito in practice.
Chapter 6
It was Roni’s third day following Nick and Mario around and filming them as they extorted various merchants. At first she’d thought that it was interesting, exciting, and worth wasting her holiday break on, but now Roni was bored. At first, she’d been appalled at the way Nick and his enforcer treated people. She didn’t know why, after all, they’d behaved the same way towards her and her father and she’d had no reason to think they’d treat other people differently.
She’d heard that after you’d been exposed to the horrors of war for a while, it stopped affecting you as much. She decided that the same thing was happening to her.
She saw herself when she glanced at the Christmas decorations in the window of the store they were passing. It was hard getting used to the way she looked in her hoodie with the scarf covering her face. Since she could see pretty well through the sheer scarf looking out, it always surprised her to see her hood with the faceless, featureless blackness of the scarf inside of it. It reminded her of the way Death was depicted in comics and movies.
Sometimes she pictured Nick reviewing the security videos from some of the stores. She didn’t know why he would. Unless something happened they almost all got written over in a week or two. But, if he did, she imagined him seeing a faceless, hooded individual near him in video after video. Someone he hadn’t seen as he made his rounds on the days in question.
She liked to picture Nick trembling in fear in the belief that Death was following him from one store to the next.
Nick and Mario turned into Thompson’s Sporting Goods. Roni slipped through the door right behind them, then passed them so she could trot up to the cash register and prop her phone on a shelf where it could record whatever happened.
When she looked back, Roni saw Nick and Mario had stopped behind some shelving near the front of the store. Are they planning to buy some exercise equipment? she wondered. She walked that direction.
Suddenly, Roni found herself involuntarily crouching in terrified horror. Hidden by shelves loaded with weights, Nick and Mario were each screwing a silencer onto a handgun!
Reminding herself that they couldn’t see her, she slowly stood up. Since she’d heard that silencers were ineffective Roni wondered why they were using them.
Finished assembling their weapons, the two men stepped out from behind the shelves and started walking toward the cash register, each holding his gun so it
dangled slightly behind his leg, presumably trying to make them harder to see.
Roni walked behind them. Why guns? she wondered. Mario killed Mr. Demopoulos with a club! Why would they need anything more?
Normally she stood on the other side of her cell phone while Nick did his thing so she could watch the screen to be sure Nick and Mario were in the picture, and also to be sure she wasn’t. However, she didn’t want to be in front of Nick and Mario in case they actually started shooting. Neither does anybody else! she thought, wondering how she could keep the store’s employees safe. She wished her cell phone was in her pocket instead of sitting on the shelf recording the proceedings. She could call 911. Staying back, she moved off to the side in the hopes that she wouldn’t be in the video picture. Unfortunately, that far back she couldn’t tell what was going on as well as she’d like.
Frustrated, Roni walked up closer behind the two men. Mario had his gun pointing at a terrified young cashier. Nick said, “We’d like to talk to Mr. Thompson.”
White as a sheet and looking terrified as her eyes focused on the gun barrel, the girl stuttered, “I, I d-don’t know if h-he’s here.”
From the tone of his voice, Roni thought Nick had one of his ugly smiles on his face. He tapped on the countertop phone with the silencer of his gun. “Well, why don’t you use the intercom on this here phone to call back to his office?”
The girl was shaking so hard it took her two tries to successfully work the intercom function on the phone. “Mr. Thompson? T-there’s some m-men out here. T-they want to talk to you.”
The voice that responded, presumably Thompson’s, sounded irritated rather than fearful. “I’ll be right out.”
He sounds pissed?! Roni thought disbelievingly. She couldn’t believe that Thompson wouldn’t recognize that the Castanos were responsible for the terror in the girl’s voice. He should’ve sounded worried.
A moment later, when the man came around the corner, she thought she understood why he hadn’t been frightened. He was hugely muscular—like you might expect of someone who owned a sporting goods store that seemed to run heavily toward weight training.
Mario was big, but not as tall. Besides, Mario was running to fat.
Thompson was solid muscle and carrying a baseball bat.
When Thompson saw the guns, he looked startled. He stopped. Roni thought he’d have tried to step back around the corner except both Mario and Nick’s guns had zeroed in on him. Nick said, “Well, my friend, we’re back like I promised. This time you’d better drop that bat. It ain’t scarin’ nobody.” Nick waggled the gun to signal why.
Thompson had paled, though he still looked more pissed off than frightened. After a moment, he dropped the bat at his feet.
Nick said, “Kick it away from you.”
Thompson did. Roni wondered if she could get him another one. She looked around her and saw a barrel of loose bats halfway down an aisle. She ran down and got a couple of wooden bats, a big one that she hoped she could get to Mr. Thompson, and one more her size in case she needed a weapon. With all the stress in the atmosphere, she found herself running on her tiptoes.
When she got back behind Nick and Mario she stopped, not wanting to go around in front of the guns to try to give Thompson the bat. She wondered what she’d do if it looked like the men might shoot.
Nick was saying, “So, the way I see it, you bein’ in business for eight months and us coverin’ you gratis for the first six, you owe us for two month’s protection… You havin’ failed to pay last month and all.”
“I don’t want protection,” the man grated.
“Oh, I think you do,” Nick said in his smarmiest voice. “Otherwise… people might get hurt.” He snapped his fingers and Mario turned his gun on the young girl behind the counter.
The girl cringed backward.
Mario shot her.
Roni’d thought he was only going to threaten her. When the weapon fired, she thought he’d just fired a shot near the girl to scare her. That silencer worked better than I thought it would, she thought. In fact, there was still quite a bit of noise, and certainly more than in the movies. But it was a lot quieter than un-silenced guns she’d heard.
As those thoughts were racing through Roni’s brain, the girl stumbled back against a cabinet, let out a tiny shriek, grabbed her abdomen, and collapsed to the floor leaving a bloody streak on the wood.
He did shoot her! Rage exploded through Roni’s thoughts.
The big bat she’d been holding tumbled to the floor.
Roni felt like an interested third party as her arms swung the other baseball bat as hard as they could toward the back of Mario’s head.
To her surprise, the bat didn’t smack Mario’s head and bounce off.
Sending a crunching sensation back up the shaft to her hand, the bat actually sank into Mario’s skull.
By the time she’d picked up on that sensation, she’d already jerked the bat loose and whirled around to swing it at Nick.
Obviously frightened by what he’d seen happen to Mario out of the corner of his eye, Nick had started crouching, pulling his head down and hunching up his shoulders. The bat bumped off the hump of his shoulders and grazed the back of his head with a meaty “thwock.”
Nick slumped to the ground beside Mario. Mario’d started jerking bizarrely.
Roni looked at Thompson. He stood frozen, staring at Nick and Mario. Call 911 you idiot, she thought. She looked over at the cashier and saw the girl take a shuddering breath suggesting that she was still alive.
Roni stepped between Nick and Mario, picked up the handset of the phone on the counter and tossed it at Thompson. Reflexively, Thompson grabbed it. Roni stabbed the buttons for 911, then ran around the end of the counter to get her cell phone. Dropping it in her pocket, she looked wildly around for security cameras but didn’t see any.
She did see a sign for restrooms at the back of the store. She ran that way.
She remembered to send out a thought that no one should notice her slamming into the bathroom—right before she started puking.
When Roni had gotten down to dry heaves, she stood up, shaking with reaction. She stared down at her right hand, suddenly realizing she still had the bat. To her surprise, it wasn’t bloody. Guess neither of them had enough time to bleed during the time the bat was in contact, she thought. Still, it’s probably got their DNA on it… And mine! She thought with horror. She stepped to the sink and rinsed her mouth. She wet a paper towel and started washing the end of the bat to try to get Nick and Mario’s DNA off of it. I also touched the big bat that’s still out there by the register! She felt pretty certain they couldn’t get fingerprints off the rough tacky surface of the bat handles, but she had no idea whether the police could pull DNA.
Remembering to think about how she didn’t want anyone to notice the bathroom door opening or her coming out, she tremblingly exited. The police were already there and an ambulance was pulling up outside. Roni walked up and saw the big bat still lying where she’d dropped it. She looked at the policemen, thinking that they should be taking pictures, but they weren’t. They probably bring in a professional photographer, she thought.
Thinking that she didn’t want them to notice the bat, she watched them while nudging the bat with a toe. Though they were staring down at the scene, neither of them seemed to react to the bat’s movement. She bent over and picked it up. They didn’t seem to pay any attention to that either.
She considered taking the two bats over and putting them back in the barrel. But what if they check every bat in the barrel for DNA? she wondered. Then she thought, No point in that, the bats have probably been handled by lots of people. No way for the police to suspect that one of the bats in the barrel was the weapon. Even if they figured that out and were able to pull DNA off the handle, they wouldn’t know which of the people who’ve touched that bat took out the Castanos. She walked down the aisle to the barrel and put the bats back in. She put the smaller one—the real weapon—in the back,
behind the other bats.
She walked back over to the cash register. One of the cops spoke to a paramedic, “They going to be okay?”
The paramedic shrugged, “The girl’s vitals are okay. She’ll probably be fine after some surgery, but that big guy’s skull was crushed. If he lives…” He paused for thought, “If he lives, he’ll be a veggie.”
Roni looked around and saw a couple of paramedics putting the cashier girl on a stretcher. After a moment they started wheeling her out.
The cop said, “And the other guy?”
The paramedic shrugged, “He’s still breathing, but he’s out cold. Concussion at least. He may have brain damage too.” He turned back to Mario, then looked back at the two cops, “This guy’s huge. Help us get him onto the stretcher?”
While they did, Roni approached Nick from the other side and started going through the pockets on his coat. Sure enough, the payoff envelopes were in an inside pocket this time. She pulled out a thick stack of them and tucked them into her own pocket. Squatting there she noticed a stench. Looking over she saw a stain in Mario’s crotch.
She stepped back away from the stink and watched as the medics and the cops rolled Mario up to get him onto the stretcher. When they did, an envelope slid out of Mario’s pocket too. Roni immediately recognized it as another one of the collection envelopes. Nick must’ve been insuring himself against losing his entire take by having Mario carry part of it.
One of the paramedics picked up the envelope and peeked inside, “Holy shit! It’s full of money!”
With a grim look on his face, the older cop held out his hand. The medic grinned around at the others, “Can’t we split this?” He said it like he was joking, but also half serious. Roni was pretty sure if the other guys had agreed the medic would’ve been enthusiastic about splitting it.
The older cop said in a low and anxious tone, “That’s mob money. They know how much should be there. If some of it goes missing, none of our lives will be worth a shit.”
The medics and the other cop paled, the one medic handing over the envelope full of cash like it was a hot potato. “Forget I ever said anything.” He started strapping Mario to the stretcher.
The Girl They Couldn’t See (Blind Spot #1) (Blind Spot Series) Page 17